Martin Rundkvist
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, board gamer, bookworm, and father of two.
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Posts by this author
January 7, 2016
The Institutet radio show: 2015 Enlighteners of the Year
The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2015.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to a radio show on Swedish Broadcasting's channel 3, Institutet, "The Institute". Show hosts Karin Gyllenklev and Jesper Rönndahl…
January 3, 2016
John asked me to create a permanent movie recommendations forum in the shape of a comment thread. Et voilà!
January 1, 2016
Here are the ten boardgames I played the most during 2015. The year's total was 78 different boardgames.
Saboteur (2004) *
Istanbul (2014) *
Love Letter (2012) *
Manhattan (1994) *
6 nimmt / Category 5 (1994)
Elysium (2015) *
El Grande (1995) *
Magic: the Gathering (1993)
Province (2014) *
Boss…
December 30, 2015
Andy Weir's The Martian. My single best read this year!
Here are my best reads in English during 2015. My total was 55 books and 16 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
The Summing Up. W. Somerset Maugham 1938. An old writer and traveller looks back on his life and turns out to have…
December 29, 2015
I’ve been blogging for a bit more than ten years now, having started on 16 December, and today Aard turns nine! I was inspired to begin blogging by my wife who started in October 2005. She worked as a news reporter at the time, and journalists were early adopters in Swedish blogging. I was doing…
December 23, 2015
Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
This is the definitive study of English cruciform brooches. Now and then a study comes along that is so comprehensive, and so well argued, that nobody will ever be likely to even try to eclipse it. It is my firm belief that future…
December 22, 2015
Most story boardgames don't let you do much tactically to influence the results or win. I've reported previously on what a game of Arkham Horror (2005) can be like. And I've played Betrayal At House On The Hill (2004) quite a lot. But the storiest of all story boardgames I've played is Tales Of…
December 21, 2015
Wearing my early-90s Tolkien Society outfit for tonight's Viking yule feast with the students. Been so long since I wore it that I'd forgotten where I'd put it. It was neatly stacked in the back corner of my closet's top shelf.
I'm slow on the uptake. It took me long to realise that the subway gets…
December 20, 2015
Vague and sweeping spoilers below.
The Force Awakens is fully on a level with the original three films, as far as I remember them. These are four good scifi action movies. The new one is actually better in being much more inclusive of women and non-Europid people. It's quite a loving re-visit to…
December 16, 2015
Together with Dorthe Wille-Jørgensen, Curator at the Danish Castle Centre in Vordingborg, I'm organising a paper session on Medieval castles at the 22nd annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. This is in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, 31 August to 4 September 2016. Here’s…
December 10, 2015
Detail of Signe Persson-Melin's & Anders B Liljefors's facade decoration on the Natur & Kultur publishing house in Stockholm.
Found the secret passage between the humanities building and the library. Now I can go eat lunch without braving the elements.
I flew to Umeå today along the…
December 2, 2015
Today I proof-read the annual index for Fornvännen, the archaeology journal I co-edit. And I took the opportunity to look at our gender stats for full-length papers. There are 16 of these in this year's four issues. Only 31% have female first authors. An additional 31% have a male first author and…
November 30, 2015
Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town
One of the most annoying and amateurish things a graphic designer can do, in my experience, is to insert hard hyphens.
I make a policy of keeping conservative and libertarian people in my Facebook feed and not muting them even though I…
November 25, 2015
A buddy of mine tagged me on Facebook to post a good song every day for a week. Here's what I came up with.
2000s. Robert Plant's (once of Led Zep) beautiful 2002 cover of ”Song To The Siren”. The original was first performed by Tim Buckley (Jeff's dad) in 1968. Pay attention to the lyrics by Larry…
November 23, 2015
It's been a busy movie-going month for me with the Monsters of Film festival, where I saw six films, and now the Stockholm International Film Festival where I've seen eight. Last year I saw ten films at the latter festival, and I enjoyed most of them, but overall I liked this year's crop even…
November 20, 2015
Soon people will be living on the site of Lännbo school that some kids torched in 2006.
Oh, will you look at that? Ten weeks into the term I find the staff lunch room with microwave ovens and free tea. Typical academic precariat long-distance commuter.
Last year I started to let the students…
November 16, 2015
Hans, Jan and Urban learning Istanbul.
This past weekend saw my sixth annual boardgaming retreat: 43 hours in good company at our usual small Nyköping hotel, all meals included. My buddy Oscar organises everything. There were a bit more than 20 of us this year after a few late cancellations,…
November 13, 2015
A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a…
November 11, 2015
In countries with a big metal detector hobby, the stereotypical participant is an anorak-wearing, rural, poorly educated, underemployed male. I don't know how true this cliché image is. But apart from the anorak, it's certainly an accurate description of the core voter demographic behind the rise…
November 10, 2015
The Saltsjöbaden Co-Ed celebrates 100 years with an open house. I've been here only once since graduation a quarter of a century ago.
I just saw toilet roll draped over a tree for the first time since 1977 when I lived in Connecticut. Hallowe'en has recently been imported into Swedish culture.…
November 2, 2015
Turbo Kid -- see this movie!
Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I've signed up for two this year. This past week it's been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five…
October 31, 2015
Birger Jarlsgatan 11, Stockholm
Nice ad here on my blog for once. It does have a pretty woman in it, but she's not a white Russian mail-order girlfriend. She's a black potential student on the course "Swedish for programmers".
Movie: Taikon. Documentary about Swedish novelist and Roma activist…
October 28, 2015
The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn.
Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access.
Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France.
Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They've been endlessly discussed for…
October 15, 2015
Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.)
Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft".
Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that…
October 14, 2015
Sweden’s largest and oldest contract archaeology organisation with five units spread across the country is known as ”UV”. This is an old in-house abbreviation that means either uppdragsverksamheten or undersökningsverksamheten, “the contract section” or “the investigation section”. After more than…
October 2, 2015
In the past couple of months Sweden has started to receive large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq and a few other war-torn Middle-eastern countries. The ones who claim the right of political asylum are adequately cared for by the immigration authorities. But many don't claim that right. They…
September 30, 2015
I'm a closeted boardgamer.
Is the gents' loo in the new Stonehenge visitors' centre fitted with Aubrey holes?
Heh. Here's a nice piece of home-made Scandy English: "the people living in the castles would spend their days doing chores, quarrelling, sleeping and eating". The author probably means…
September 17, 2015
Google Play Music's randomiser has recently served me up with two songs about extremely talkative girlfriends. In the Spongetones' "My Girl Maryanne" the singer finds the woman's chattiness adorable. In Gap Dream's "Immediate Life Sentence" he finds it annoying and concludes the song "I don't need…
September 14, 2015
Reading a good book, Charles' Nicholl's The Reckoning. The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992, 2nd expanded ed. 2002), about the 16th century playwright. It's a bit overloaded with asides and covers far more characters and factions than anyone can keep track of without extensive note-taking. But…
September 2, 2015
Registering the bones from this summer's fieldwork at Landsjö.
Getting rid of excess stuff. Azerbaijani dude with a huge beautiful beard showed up on his wife's orders and collected both bike baby seats, the rolling baby stool, the dinner table lamp and the microwave oven. *happy*
My wife's…